Here at the Colin McEnroe Show, we got a little weary last week of all the Conan-did-this and Jay-said-that.

We wondered if there were any more creative ways of looking at the state of modern television. Or creative old ways. I say this because a lot of my own thinking right now is driven by a recent reading (and teaching) of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. Published in 1964, Understanding Media gives you a pretty good blueprint for "understanding" a lot of what's happening in 2010.

McLuhan would say: don't look at content alone. Look at content in the context of the delivery system you're using to consume it. Look at the interaction among the viewer, the medium and the content on the medium.

So a guy watching Jay Leno at 10 p.m. on a 52 inch hi-def screen is going to have a very different reaction that somebody watching Jon Stewart on a laptop.

Not only do talkshows look odd in HD, but I feel like movies and some television shows lose something in HD. Its almost as if you could see the production (the background business) of the show or film which you didnt see before without HD. Im thinking about the latest Johnny Depp movie where every movement during the action scenes made him look like a bad actor because everything was so crisp. You saw that he was acting.

Is this something that others are seeing too? Do we know if this will change production or the use of HD TV's in general?

Over the Christmas vacation I was thrilled to share the new Magic cord HDMI which meant I could stream netflix movies from my laptop to my parents television. I thought that maybe soon I could dump comcast cable all together. Luckily I didn't because this week I got my Verizon wireless air card bill which charged me hundreds for overage megabite usage!! I am so tired of paying for all these gizmos and changing my set up.